Building my Home Lab

I’m putting together a home lab which I will use to learn/test/play with new technologies. A virtual environment allows you to create test environments which help with studying for MCP, VCP or other IT exams.

Server:
I have yet to put this together. I was previously using a Dell PowerEdge T110. I found that server to be too big and too noisy. It also maxed out at 16GB of RAM. Here are the parts I got for the new server:

I will be installing VMware ESXi 5.5 on this machine. ESXi 5.5 does not include the driver for the network interfaces used on this board, so I used the instructions here to create a custom install ISO, which I hope can be mounted remotely using the vPro feature.